On The Subject of Love
by The Smiling Shadow
Summary: Herbert West does not love. He will not until death is conquered. But living with Daniel Cain who so loves a woman named Meg, the question of exactly what it is comes up. And so Herbert reveals how he would treat the woman he'd love.


Herbert West had stolen a wonderful woman. Her name that was so delicately written onto her label by his own hands was "Jane Doe," and he seemed infatuated by her. Daniel Cain stood at the doorway in something that had become methodic in his increasingly strange life. Herbert goes and spots a body, one he wants, one he needs beyond all other wants and needs. His determination like his imagination was endless and Daniel knew no matter what the odds Herbert would get that body and make it his. To take it from its uselessness as Herbert said, to make it something, to take what was so plainly being disregarded, and make it worth something again.

Daniel Cain stood in the doorway not to disturb Herbert and his first meeting with this woman, this body, this flesh that had called to him the moment it died. Daniel knew better than to stand between that man and what he wanted. He took it upon himself to be merely an observer, for observing Herbert West was like speaking to him and this was the only way Daniel could ever get to know him. Herbert moved slowly amongst the dead, as if he truly believed they were somehow alive.

"It's the body." Herbert once said to Daniel. "The mind may not recall, but the body does and it will."

And Herbert took the sheet off Jane Doe's face and in quiet admiration gawked at her. She was but twenty or so like him, but so unlike him. He saw she had been strangled by a man most likely that had abused her and her body. Who had used it and taken it and thought it was his. She seemed so beautiful, but the bags in her eyes he knew she had spent days without sleep for fear of her owner. But in death she'd sleep, and with the life he'd give her she could wake again. He so slowly raised her face to look at him and brushed the hair out of her face.

This was Herbert West admirer a lover, a collaborator. This was Herbert West loving another person. This was Herbert West. And the way he looked at the dead, it almost scared Daniel, as long as he didn't look at the living that way though, Daniel was fine. But Herbert he treated them better than he treated the living. He cherished them, he took care of them.

Slowly Herbert raised his head and motioned for Dan to help him, and together they took her away from that horrible place.

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"Why a woman, West?" Daniel dared to ask.

He hated the smell of his basement, Daniel did. It smelled of death that Herbert so loved. He'd sleep in the graveyard if he could, Daniel thought about West, he'd do it without a second thought, probably the best sleep of his life. The basement had an incinerator now, where the bodies of failed life went, the abortions of Herbert West, where life could not be retrieved. The floor was hopelessly a blood red color. Two medical tables held a body and body parts. Another shelf where the knives and surgical tools and even the chemical it self were stored.

Daniel could only make it to the top of the stairs now, the smell was just too much and Daniel feared Herbert asking him to help, he didn't want to even touch the bodies anymore after they went down there, he just couldn't stand it anymore.

Herbert West was in the process of creating a woman who had never lived before, a woman who had the body parts of others, and together the parts would remember what it was to live. Hands would know to grasp, feet would know to walk, eyes would know to see. This was his theory and he was so intent on seeing it through. And so he gathered women, and took them apart to make them into one, and so they could live on forever.

Herbert was too involved in cleaning the body to hear Daniel.

"West?"

Herbert looked up.

"Why a woman?"

Herbert looked down to Jane Doe and Daniel could have sworn he smiled.

"Women are fascinating, Daniel." Herbert said.

"You're telling me." Daniel laughed.

"They give life." Herbert emphasized.

He skimmed his hand over the woman's stomach to where a child would have grown, to where life could have been made from nearly nothing.

"They can do what I have so strived for. They are built to give it in fact. They take life from within themselves and create it into someone else, give it to someone else." Herbert explained. "To create something that in itself can create, is that not what any creator wants?"

"Or a father."

Herbert did not seem to understand the similarity. Herbert lacked a father that could even be called a father. Herbert in his mind had none, the man that owned the house he stayed in, the man who yelled and drove everything that was good away, the man that could never see his son's brilliance, that man was no father, not even in the slightest.

"Women are simply more difficult in biology than men." Herbert said.

"Ah, a challenge is what you seek." Daniel smiled.

"Indeed." 

Herbert took Jane Doe by the hand and examined her, touching her in ways only a lover would, and he did it so gently and so skilled, it was horrifying to think that he must have only practiced with the dead. Daniel first suspected Herbert of some sick fetish with the dead, to which Herbert was greatly offended with.

"I am trying to save them from death! Why would I relish and glorify it!?" Herbert screamed. "There is nothing beautiful about death! There is nothing to be loved in death!"

Daniel only wanted to be sure, because he looked at the dead more lovingly than the living. And Herbert that anger that he seemed to carry with him all over in his eyes when he looked at Daniel, and yet at the dead a gentleness came over them. The bitterness that Herbert had for the living ceased on the dead and he only wished to bring them back. And Herbert only had that bitterness because the living just died so often.

Daniel could see even from his view on the stairs, the construction of a living being that had never lived in the corner, draped for his own shake. Daniel could not stop Herbert, he almost did not want to, because it sounded like it could work. But Herbert knew Daniel could not stand his work, and so Herbert was sometimes kind enough to cover the work away so Daniel didn't have to look.

"What will you take from her?" Daniel asked.

Herbert was now looking at her legs.

"Her hips. I believe." Herbert said. "They are good child-bearing hips."

"You plan to get her pregnant?" Daniel almost didn't want to ask.

Herbert seemed surprised.

"I plan to give her the possibility." Herbert explained. "Do you mean to say I'd do it?" Herbert shakes his head. "To lower to such a level, I cannot imagine." He was disgusted.

"Oh?" Daniel seemed to playfully offended. "What Herbert? Are you a Virgin?"

"As if you need to ask." Herbert rolled his eyes.

"You don't know how to do the nasty?" Daniel had a grin on his face.

"The name applies wonderfully." Herbert says.

"What do you mean? What's wrong with sex? I'd think you'd like the creation of life?"

"I do, but sex for mere pleasure! You see those people coming into abortions day in and day out, abusing their purpose in this life! The one purpose nature was kind enough to give us!"

Herbert was getting into his debate mode, actually looking up at Daniel.

"It offends me as a person!" Herbert yelled. "What you and your woman do!"

"Meg! And how do you know…"

"Our walls are paper thin, Daniel! I can hear everything!"

Daniel laughed and covered his face for he was blushing.

"Aw, ew, man, pervert!"

"Don't call me that!" Herbert yelled.

Daniel laughed.

"Come on, West, I'm just teasing you."

Herbert West was unable to tell the difference between mocking and mere teasing, and so he took Dan's word on it and slowly backed away less defensive.

"You don't get it, West. Sex, it's more than just that, you're with someone, you're closer to them than you could ever be, and there's something special about being that person that's close to someone else." Daniel tried to explain.

Herbert seemed unmoved.

"I mean. Don't you want that, West? Don't you want to be close to someone else?" Daniel tried.

Herbert West did not move for a long time.

"West?"

"To show my flaws, to show my vulnerabilities, my hopes, my dreams, my desires?" West wanted clarification.

"Well, yes."

Herbert turned away, and didn't bother to answer.

"I have to go, Meg's coming over for dinner, I have to make that dinner." Daniel smiled and left.

Herbert West took Jane Doe's hips and so gently said goodbye to her as he put her in the incinerator. The smell of burning flesh consumed the room, and Herbert could not work under such distractions.

He stood in its center waiting for the smell to go away, and he heard above him the dinner of two happy people, happy to just be with each other. Love was not a thing Herbert was going to make himself absent of. If anything he loved life, he loved being alive, and he loved it so dearly he neglected it to preserve it.

He had decided at such a young age to not develop the skills necessary to form relationships. As a teenager though his body demanded to touch a woman, his worries were on weather or not life could be stimulated electrically or chemically and this absorbed him through out those youthful years. Women to him were not attractive in their shape, but in their ability to preserve and carry life. This sadly made men all the more duller. However Herbert knew there was no woman in her right mind that would have ever accepted him as he was, as he was a terrible candidate for a lover, and for a husband when there were so many others. This worked out for the best as he did not want to find a woman.

He did not want that love or that companionship or that safety. He had work, he had work that would take a lifetime but he had even less time to do it because he did not want to die. And so where friends could have been made a chemical to reanimate tissue was made. Where love could have been found there was only a bitterness from so many failures.

When the work was over, when he could live forever and whoever he chose to share that with could live forever. When there would be time for him to learn how to make friends and how to be caring and loving. When he would never die was when he would concern himself with the desires of other people. When that hunger and need would finally be satisfied.

Until then Herbert West had the dead. His lover was death, and his enemy was death, and he knew her so well, up and down, he could have described her. Death that had plagued him since his birth, where his mother died giving birth to him, it was death that grabbed him, death that consumed him. Death that teased him and taunted him and death that comforted him. And at the end where Herbert West had to sleep the only thing he knew was death.

He stood listening to Meg and Daniel, wondering how could they smile when they were slowly dying. Dying, always dying, every second of every day you are closer to death and you are always dying.

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Herbert emerged into the living room which doubled as a dining room with the small coffee table that Daniel had bought at a garage sale. He saw Daniel and Meg sitting together on the large brown couch that had come with the house. They were laughing and feeding each other food that would only harm their bodies. He watched in amazement, how anyone could do it, knowing what he knew, how anyone at all could be happy.

Meg silenced herself when she saw Herbert, almost afraid, and Daniel smiled.

"West." Daniel didn't know what else to say.

"May I join you?" Herbert asked.

Daniel motioned for the other chair across the table and put his arm around Meg trying to tell her it was okay, the dealer of death was here, but he was just a guy. Herbert awkwardly sat across from them and caused a long silence between the three of them.

"Do you want anything to eat?" Dan asked.

Herbert shook his head.

"I merely want to watch." Herbert said.

"For your amusement?" Meg seemed offended.

"That is not what I meant."

"Hey." Dan told them. "This is my friend." He told Meg. "This is the woman I love." He told Herbert.

"Love?" Herbert asked and Daniel nodded. "Why?"

Daniel placed his foot on the table and sat back, looking at Meg who still seemed uncomfortable about all this.

And Herbert West just stared. He just stared and stared and tried to see what this love was, and why everyone on the earth was so seeking it, and why it drove so many. And he saw but two people, two bodies merely dying. He could not see the care in their eyes or how they sat so closely to each other, and so slightly touched each other in the smallest of ways. He tried to see what this love was, what this thing was that he would one day be attempting. But nothing came until they spoke.

"He's judging us." She told Dan.

"He's just curios, give the guy a break, Meg. I mean with us around all the time…" Dan shrugged and she suddenly looked guilt ridden.

She fell back on the couch with Dan. And Herbert stared at them.

"I love you." Dan told her. "Because you make me feel needed. Because you make me feel like I can do these things." Dan motioned towards Herbert. "Because you make me happy, you make me feel safe. You make me feel like if I lost everything it'd still be all right."

Daniel Cain told her, the one he loved, and not Herbert.

"What do you believe love is then?" Herbert interjected. "As a doctor you know the chemicals that affect emotional response."

Dan shrugged.

"Love is a willingness." Meg started, and they looked at her. "It is a willingness to give up everything you have and give it to someone else. It is a longing to have them, and yet be given to them. It is a willingness and a desire to be examined, and to be known, and to examine, and to know."

"Well put." Dan smiled.

Herbert only sat, contemplating as he often did about the possibilities of what their words meant, of what could be meant for him. He did want to love, some day, when the work was done, and the dead could live.

"Why?" Meg asked. "Why do you ask about love, this is the first time you and I have spoken in almost a year."

Herbert looked up at her.

"The subject came up." Herbert explained.

"And how do you think it's right to love if you are so inexperienced?" She asked rather cruelly.

Herbert stared long and hard at her.

"The man cannot have a child." Herbert said. "Yet the woman cannot give life to her child without the man. Both need each other. In the eyes of nature men and women are both needed and neither is more important than the other. If I were to love a woman I would worship her, for she gives life to our child, and she would worship me for I give her the part she requires. We would be equal in our worship and our praise and our respect and our love. Neither of us would be more important than the other, we would not compete against one another, for we both need each other.

The room was silent in the dim light as Herbert West stared at people who seemed more like strangers than friends. But Dan leaned forward and smiled so slightly.

"For someone who doesn't know anything about anything, that was pretty spot on."


End file.
